Habits, automatisms

During my last years of reading and analysing my behaviour and the people around me is that we are governed more by the automated behaviour, response than the planned, analysed and thoroughly organized intentions. Why is this happening?
Well, apparently, human sensory inputs provide an overwhelming quantity of information for our brain to process consciously, so there were developed mechanisms to optimize the loss of this information in quality and quantity.

Information filtering through beliefs

First, information is filtered through our beliefs system. Information relevant to our beliefs is retained, and the rest is discarded. That’s why that people with the “life sucks” belief will see the glass half empty, that’s why an event will be recollected differently by eye witnesses, that why an ambiguous sentence will be interpreted differently by listeners with different states of mind.

Automatic behaviour

A response to a stimulus performed repeatedly (through training, teaching or personal judgement) will transform into an automatic behaviour controlled unconsciously. After automatic processing of information there is left only a few pieces for the logic brain to observe, analyse and classify.

Therefore most of our responses are automatic behaviour and that’s why they are so important. We usually call them habits. One category that influence our lives tremendously are the stress responses. Let me name the bad guys of the bunch to emphasize their importance: overeating, procrastination, social anxieties.

CBT ( Cognitive behavioural therapy ) is by my experience the most effective technique for changing and improving your automatic responses. IT is simple and effective: start by journalling your reactions, stimuli, then analyse what is right, what is wrong, what should be a better response to a specific stimulus and then tenaciously work day by day in catching those stimuli quicker and quicker and change your response accordingly to your analysis till it becomes the new habit.

Consequences

I intend to fill this list ans time goes by and I identify similar/related processes: